A Swarm of Angels
Encyclopedia
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons...
notion of flexible copyright licencing, to permit people to freely download, share, and remix the original media made for the project.
A Swarm of Angels is the brainchild of film producer and author Matt Hanson
Matt Hanson
Matt Hanson is an author, film producer, and film director, specializing in digital art. He has created a series of projects which investigate cinema's possible futures, including A Swarm of Angels, onedotzero, and book projects including The End of Celluloid...
, founder of the onedotzero
Onedotzero
onedotzero is a contemporary, digital arts organisation with a remit to promote innovation across all forms of moving image and motion arts....
digital film festival. He has labelled the process Cinema 2.0. It would be the first time for a project of this scale to be funded, produced and distributed in this way.
Advisors to A Swarm of Angels include science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
author and copyright activist Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow
Cory Efram Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licences for his books...
, graphic novel
Graphic novel
A graphic novel is a narrative work in which the story is conveyed to the reader using sequential art in either an experimental design or in a traditional comics format...
ist Warren Ellis
Warren Ellis
Warren Girard Ellis is an English author of comics, novels, and television, who is well-known for sociocultural commentary, both through his online presence and through his writing, which covers transhumanist themes...
, pioneer digital film producer Tommy Pallotta
Tommy Pallotta
Tommy Pallotta is an American film director and producer.-Biography:Pallotta received a degree in Philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. There, he met Richard Linklater and began his film career as an actor and production assistant on Linklater's directorial debut, Slacker...
, and musical mashup
Mashup (music)
A mashup or bootleg is a song or composition created by blending two or more pre-recorded songs, usually by overlaying the vocal track of one song seamlessly over the instrumental track of another...
artist Eric Kleptone of The Kleptones
The Kleptones
The Kleptones, aka Eric Kleptone, is a DJ from Brighton in the United Kingdom who produces internet-only mashup albums. Typically, he mixes rock/R&B instrumentals with rap and hip-hop vocals in a style that is "fun...and often surprising." His name is a parody of the famous guitarist, Eric...
.
Participation
A Swarm of Angels is recruiting a community capped at 50,000. Members can have a say in the script development. Two scripts are being developed, with one to be chosen by ASOA members to be produced. The scripts were being developed via the project forum and are entitled, The Unfold, and The Ravages (formerly known as Glitch). According to the official website, the first two A Swarm of Angels are "likely to be thriller based with soft sci-fi elements."The project had its first voting day on 21 September 2006, where members were polled on certain decisions via their forum, The Nine Orders.
Recognition
The project won the R&D/Innovation category Britain's Digital Elite awards (sponsored by Real Business magazine and Microsoft) in October 2007.The project was nominated for the May 2006 "Next Big Web Thing" award, which it subsequently won.
Challenges
After gaining big interest and participation levels during the first year in which the project was launched, development has slowed significantly in 2008.In early 2009 the official webpage was taken offline to reset the project information for the next phase of production and collaboration. This was in direct response to criticism of the information density and the slow progress of the project, with subsequent difficulty in engagement for new users.
During the 3 years the website was online, about 1000 people registered as angels. The target of 50.000 is unlikely to be reached.
Project updates have been continuing via micro-blog updates. The Nine Orders forum appears to have been discontinued and has since been hijacked by malware promoters.